Essays in Organizational Economics

This thesis consists of three independent essays which contribute to the literatures on organizational and regulatory economics.In the first part of the dissertation, I address questions related to the optimal incentive provision in hierarchies. In particular, I investigate how the choice of the optimal compensation policy of an organization is affected by the workers' psychological preferences for reciprocity. This essay relates to a recent strand of theoretical and empirical research that studies how the presence of reciprocity concerns impacts on the optimal organizational design (See e.g. Dohmen et al. 2009, Englmaier and Leider, 2012, Englmaier et al. 2015).The second part of the dissertation concerns the optimal design and regulation of a hierarchical organization in the presence of capture concerns. In many organizations the task of evaluating an agent's performance is delegated to a third party, a supervisor, who can opportunistically misreport information. The question of how the provision of incentives in hierarchies is affected by the supervisor's opportunism has long been studied in economics. Addressing this research question is of great importance since it can improve our understanding of the internal organization of firms and can have broad applications to regulatory design.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion